Mitt Romney has moved to 'reset' his flagging election campaign, promising to
be clearer with voters on how his presidency would create jobs and
reinvigorate America's struggling middle class.

After a weekend of emergency strategising at his campaign's headquarters in Boston, the Republican challenger finally announced some specific policy objectives in an attempt to close Barack Obama's persistent lead in the polls.

Mr Romney has been under fire from his own party in recent days, both for an ill-judged response to the anti-US demonstrations in the Middle East protests and for an anaemic, policy-free domestic campaign.

He has also succeeded in frustrating many Republicans with a campaign-strategy seemingly based on hoping that a weak economic recovery and general disappointment with Mr Obama will be sufficient for him to prevail in November.

That finally appeared to change on Monday, as Mr Romney released two new television adverts, in which he stared directly into camera and promised "to help the middle class", while creating the business conditions that would "add 12 million new jobs in four years".

In a second advert, Mr Romney also charged Mr Obama with "failing American families" by allowing the national debt to grow by $5 trillion while average household incomes have shrunk by $4,000.

"We do think the timing is right at this moment to reinforce more specifics," said Ed Gillespie, a senior Romney adviser, setting out the campaign's new direction.

However the reset was in danger of being undermined from the outset after internal tensions within the Romney campaign broke out into the open after anonymous aides accused Mr Romney's chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, of having the aura of a "mad professor".

"I always have the impression Stuart must save his best stuff for meetings I'm not important enough to attend. The campaign is filled with people who spend a lot of their time either avoiding him or resisting him," a Romney insider, told Politico magazine in a back-biting news article.

It described the Romney campaign as "chaotic", detailing how Mr Stevens, 58, had commissioned two separate drafts of Mr Romney's Convention acceptance speech, only to rip both up, before penning the poorly-received final version at the last minute with Mr Romney himself.

Back on the campaign trail yesterday Mr Romney moved to heal his relationship with crucial Hispanic voters, after a primary season in which he tacked hard to the right on immigration, advocating "self-deportation" and rejecting plans to allow the children of illegal immigrants to win citizenship.

"Americans may disagree about how to fix our immigration system, but I think we can all agree that it is broken," Mr Romney was due to say in a speech Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles.

Mr Obama, meanwhile, was in the battleground state of Ohio in the industrial Midwest, where he attempted to neutralise Mr Romney's accusations that the Obama administration has been soft on China's bending of international trade rules.

The president's visit was timed with the announcement that the Obama administration was filing a World Trade Organisation suit to complain about $3bn of allegedly illegal subsidies that they claim are allowing Chinese car-parts manufacturers to unfairly undercut US producers.

"I understand my opponent has been running around Ohio claiming he's going to roll up his sleeves and take the fight to China," Mr Obama told a crowd in Cincinnati, before accusing Mr Romney of taking advantage of cheap Chinese labour while boss of Bain Capital private equity.

"Here's the thing: his experience has been owning companies that were called 'pioneers' in the business of outsourcing jobs to countries like China. Pioneers! Ohio, you can't stand up to China when all you've done is send them our jobs."

For his part, Mr Romney accused Mr Obama of "doing too little, too late" and filing the WTO suit out of political expediency: "President Obama's credibility on this issue has long since vanished. I will not wait until the last months of my presidency to stand up to China, or do so only when votes are at stake," he said.